Feds charge seven men in ‘click-jacking’ scheme
In a reminder to consumers to be careful what they click on, federal authorities have charged seven men with infecting millions of computers with a virus-like program that tricked users’ Web browsers into navigating to phony pages stocked with ads, earning the defendants as much as $14 million. In a type of online fraud known as click-jacking, the malicious software waited for users to click on links to popular sites like Apple’s iTunes or Netflix.com, and then quietly redirected their browsers to similar-looking sites loaded with online ads — ads that allegedly earned the defendants cash each time they were displayed.
